The best salesperson in the region gets the region. It sounds like logic and it is actually a category error, repeated so universally that most companies no longer notice they are making it. Closing deals and running a team of people who close deals share a vocabulary and almost nothing else. One is a craft of persuasion aimed outward; the other is a daily practice of attention aimed at eight humans with eight different problems. The company has data proving she excels at the first. It promotes her on that data, into the second, and calls the inference a talent process.
This is how accidental managers are made: not by ambition, but by extrapolation. The org needed a manager, the spreadsheet had a ranking, and the top row got the job. Nobody asked whether she wanted to spend her days on other people's development, because wanting it was never a criterion. Nobody checked whether anyone would choose to follow her, because followership was never measured. The selection evidence was real evidence, rigorously collected, about a different occupation.
The bill arrives quickly
The people handed roles this way tell researchers exactly how it feels. In Deloitte's 2025 Global Human Capital Trends survey of nearly 10,000 leaders across 93 countries, 36% of managers said they feel unprepared for the people-management part of their job, which is a remarkable confession given that people management is nominally the job. The same research found managers spending close to 40% of their time on administration and firefighting and only 13% developing their people, so the accidental manager's unpreparedness meets a role that gives her almost no practice at the part she is unprepared for.
Gallup's global tracking suggests the arrangement is wearing its occupants down: manager engagement worldwide fell to 22% in the 2025 State of the Global Workplace report, down nine points since 2022, the steepest decline of any employee group. Some of those disengaged managers are surely poor fits for management. But a portion never chose it in any meaningful sense. They accepted the only raise on offer and discovered, too late to retreat gracefully, that the prize was a profession they would not have applied for.
What Semco selected for instead
Ricardo Semler tells a story that inverts the credential logic. Semco had factories effectively run by engineers without diplomas, and at one point a maintenance technician, no degree, leading two hundred people, for the only reason that survives contact with reality: everyone trusted him. Meanwhile, MBAs from excellent schools could not run a meeting. Semler's conclusion hardened into practice: trust does not come with a gown, and he never looked at a diploma before hiring. The relevant evidence for whether someone can lead people is whether people, given a choice, are already following them.
That criterion sounds soft and is actually the hard one. Sales numbers and code quality are easy to read off a dashboard; the willingness of a team to be led by a specific person is only observable by asking the team, or by watching whom colleagues seek out when something breaks and no one has assigned responsibility yet. Most promotion processes consult neither. They consult the candidate's output in the previous role and the opinion of a boss two levels up, the one person structurally furthest from experiencing the candidate's leadership.
Closing the accident factory
Fixing this does not require exotic structures, only honesty about what is being selected for. Separate the reward for craft excellence from the appointment to management, so the promotion machine stops running on gratitude. Treat management as a lateral move with its own tryout: let candidates actually lead something small and revocable, a project, a rotation, before anyone makes it permanent. Weigh the testimony of the led, since they hold the only direct evidence. And keep the road back open at full salary, so a wrong guess costs a title, not a livelihood, and can be admitted before it costs a team.
The accidental manager is not a character flaw; she is an output. Organizations that promote on the wrong evidence will manufacture her at scale, then spend on coaching, engagement surveys and turnover what they saved by not asking one question at the start: who already follows this person, and would they choose to keep doing so? Everything the role requires is compressed into that answer, and it is the one piece of evidence the process never collects.
Sources
- Deloitte (2025). 2025 Global Human Capital Trends. 36% of managers feel unprepared for people management; managers spend ~40% of time on admin and firefighting, 13% developing people. https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/topics/talent/human-capital-trends/2025.html
- Gallup (2025). State of the Global Workplace 2025. Manager engagement fell to 22%, down nine points since 2022, the steepest drop of any group. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/659610/state-global-workplace.aspx